Excerpt from the dvd, “Somatic Approaches to Movement: Interviews with founders, teachers and choreographers”. With kind permission of Lila Greene, project director, with the support of eeg-cowles foundation; Odile Rouquet, founder of Recherche en Mouvement and Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum. This 2 hour DVD is available in North America at eeg-cowles Foundation; in Europe at Recherche en Mouvement (REM).

]]>Dance and Spiritualityhttp://lindarabin.com/dance-and-spirituality/
Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:58:08 +0000http://lindarabin.com/?p=58Dance and spirituality has always been an interwoven presence in my life – professionally and personally. The shape and tone of how this weaving is expressed shifts over time, with the changes that life experiences bring. I’d like to open with some words that came to me spontaneously when I first thought about this theme for today. When I look at the body as movement, I think… the earth body is movement, the space, the universe is movement. So then I ask, what does it mean to dance?

For me it is simple, and straightforward. Movement is the expression of life, of existence, of the universe. This movement is fluid, i.e., it is the movement of waves… undulations, vibrations, pulsations. These are the same movements that animate this body we are, this body that does plies, tendus, spirals, falls… Is dance not just another manifestation of the living breathing universe, of which we are a part?

And what about spirituality? Call it god, the divine, the universal force, or any other name that different religions offer, all of Nature is infused with a life force, and this life force is expressed as movement, as breath, as breathing in and breathing out, becoming form, the dissolution of form.

An example: The embryo pulsates and transforms into an ongoing shaping process that when arriving on land, we call baby. But this movement process never stops. It continues into life markers we name as adolescence, adulthood and old age. These developmental stages are moments on a continuum of existence that never stands still. Movement is constant.

So what is spirituality? Being in connection with the essence of existence? Attuned to this life force? Providing space for such consciousness to be expressed in daily life, daily actions?

And what is dance then? For me, dance is human being’s need to express this life force as it exists in our socio-cultural body. Dance may take on many different styles and forms – ballet, contemporary, street dance, jazz, salsa, hip hop… And choreographers will draw on themes – political, social or cultural. But what underlies these choices of form and expression? What forces of life provide the urge to create? The impulse to dance? Underneath these forms and expressions is the essence of life -movement. Pure and simple – movement – the language of the living universe.

When I taught dance technique, when I choreographed dances or today, when I teach creative process or Continuum… my curiosity and search for what is at the source is always there. In my younger years, as a dance teacher and choreographer, I would look at a dancer and sense something going on below the level of their awareness, something dormant, or untapped. I would see where there were blockages that interrupted the harmonious flow through the body – that kept the intention from being fully realized in their dancing. Sometimes it was about releasing excessive tension in the eyes, or stimulating more physical engagement in the pelvis, or maybe about unveiling an unconscious emotional pattern. I would work with the dancer to bring those energies to the surface, to become integrated with the rest of their dancing self. I searched to facilitate the dancer’s total aliveness, so that when they danced in class, or were in performance, they were free to be fully present – that every particle of their being was available to be in service to the moment. I was looking to engage the whole being. I worked from a place of intuition and used images in whatever way I could. I was always searching for the root – the root metaphor, the root image, the root cause that held back a fully realized performance, or rather, a fully realized being in performance.

A circle is a beautiful metaphor for describing the movement of leaving and returning. We go out into the world then find ourselves, somewhere along the road, back where we started. The spiral however is perhaps a more accurate metaphor for what I want to convey. Have you not experienced that with the passage of time, you return again and again to the familiar place of before, but with each successive return a new perception is revealed? There is a subtle shift, a new appreciation, interpretation and understanding. In the past, my quest to “get at the root” guided me to bring out the best in the dancer’s technical performance, the integrity in interpretation of a role, to reveal the vulnerable places that would feed a fuller more authentic presence. The urgency and drive that fed my energy was composed of my ambition as a dance professional, and my need to draw from the essence of life.

My desire to get at the root has spiraled into a softer more fluid language today. I speak to “being at the source”, as waters of transformation, a place of nourishment. I continue to be called toward what is at the origin, but I am not the director of this process. I receive. I yield into what is being revealed and join in with my presence with whatever is going on. My call to engage the whole person for dance performance is now a call to engage the whole person in the Dance of Life. I believe this was always true for me, even then when I was deep in my professional dance career. My view of the dancer’s body is as being part of a vast web where you, me and all living organisms, the planet and the universe are an expression of one larger body. Imagine (a dance practice based on) being present to the movements of such vastness.

Now if we bring this awareness into our socio-cultural dancing bodies, what kind of dances would we be creating? What kind of performers would be dancing? What messages would be conveyed to audiences? And how would they receive those messages in their bodies?

Today I practice an approach called Continuum, along with a number of dance artists in the city – performers, teachers and choreographers.

The practice

I slow down, I sound, I pay attention to internal sensations and feel the movement. Tiny movements, larger movements – that undulate and pulsate. Movements that recall the origins of life, that evoke our embryonic beginnings, our emergence from the primordial ocean, perhaps even our origins before the ocean when we were whirling star dust in the universe. In those moments I experience ALL as in relationship. That we are all part of a vast web of existence. The slightest wave within my tissue has a repercussion on the movement of a leaf, a bird, the ocean and the stars. In the same way, we understand how the moon affects the tides of the ocean and the flow of menstrual blood in women’s bodies. TThis is the living universe. This is movement. A kind of dance.

So, to weave my last strands of thought on dance and spirituality I’ll close with the following:

Dance is Movement. Movement is Life. It is with the body that we dance. And in the body that we feel the movement – of life. And what animates this life? That is a mystery. This Mystery is whispering through our tissues, and if we pay close attention, we can feel its murmurings as undulating waves, resonating from the tiniest cells to the vastness of the universe.

Dressed in close-fitting dance clothes, instructor Linda Rabin lies on a blue yoga mat in the middle of a circle of observing participants. A stirring sets her belly in motion. It is not the expected rise and fall of breath. Rather, the movement provoked resembles the effect of a pebble dropped into water, a ripple resounds and travels. Gathering momentum and increasing in amplitude, the seemingly involuntary, undulating movement waves, crests, rebounds, and “tributates” into the limbs. We are invited to deepen our observation through touch. As I gently place my hand on her torso, I marvel at how it is not like any other movement I have felt on a body. Not muscular, it is powered by a force that seems beyond will and intention.

Canadian dance innovator Linda Rabin is one of a handful of Canadian teachers of Continuum, the movement practice developed by American Emilie Conrad. Continuum’s central teaching is that all fluids in the body function as one integrated “intelligence” and that they are in concert with all fluids in the environment and atmosphere. Conrad is cautious when including Continuum among the techniques, such as Alexander and Feldenkrais, which make up what we have come to know as the field of somatics. She is critical of our culture’s tendency to ghettoize and, in so doing, oversimplify subtle concepts that aren’t easily categorized. For Rabin, Continuum is a holistic, educative practice that has physical, creative, spiritual and therapeutic applications. Through her, the Canadian dance community is enjoying the opportunity to bathe in new ideas and expand its creative resources.

A typical Continuum group class starts with a brief explanation of concepts to be explored. This verbal presentation is immediately followed by an instructor demonstration. Not meant to induce replication, the observation brings the student into empathic communion with the instructor’s body, thereby transmitting information on a subconscious, non-cognitive, non-verbal level. In Continuum, experiencing is emphasized over theorizing. By attending deeply to sensation, imagination and feeling through guided explorations of breath, sound and movement, one uncovers all manner of knowledge through experience.

A former choreographer and teacher, who now devotes the better part of her life to this empowering practice, Rabin’s path to her new vocation was anything but linear. After several years of questioning in the late 1980s, Rabin heeded a very clear internal voice that said, “You can’t continue to be in the dance field if you want to evolve further as a human being.” In 1991, she retired as co-director of LADMMI (Les Ateliers de la danse moderne de Montréal, Inc.), the pre-professional training school she had co-founded in 1981. “I had no idea what I wanted to do next but I knew I had to be in this empty bowl place – to feel and live that – before the bowl could begin to fill up with inspiration and ideas and a sense of where to go next.”

For the next couple of years, she spent time doing everyday things she had never before given herself the time to do – walking, riding her bike up Montréal’s Mount Royal, swimming, singing in a choir and learning to cook. Her life began to regain focus when she met osteopath and energy healer Marie Anne Manny, from whom she acquired a wide array of tools for personal resourcing. Stimulated by Manny’s work, Rabin delighted in the exploration of concepts found in diverse practices ranging from Taoist meditation to experiential anatomy.

Rabin was no stranger to somatic practice having studied Alexander Technique since the late 1960s and Ideokinesis, which she studied with its originator, Lulu Sweigard, at Juilliard. Nor were spirituality, healing and ritual foreign to her, having probed these themes in the twenty-year span of her choreographic work. However, she was still convinced there would be a definitive departure from dance in her life. When Rabin pressed Manny for insights into where these explorations might be leading, Manny responded, “Linda, you’re not going to leave dance. You can’t. It’s too much in your blood. But what will change is your attitude towards it, your relationship with dance will shift.” At the time, this infuriated Rabin and she recalls thinking: “I will show her otherwise.” In retrospect, however, she realizes that she had to ostensibly let go of dance and undergo a kind of personal transformation in order to be able “to greet the dance world again in some other manner.”

At the end of a four-year immersion in Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering® work, which led to a practitioner certification, Rabin discovered Emilie Conrad and her Continuum Movement practice. For Rabin, finding validation in Continuum of the sometimes ineffable yet profound and life-affirming discoveries she had been making in her personal movement practice was a significant breakthrough: “I knew I was in the realm of deep intelligence, our bio-intelligence, the intelligence of the universe.”

It is Continuum that brought Rabin “home” in her body and Continuum that has brought her back to the dance community. While she maintains a regular teaching practice in Continuum for the general public in Montréal, across Canada and in Europe, she has begun to share Continuum with dance students at LADMMI and L’École de danse de Québec. As well, choreographers, including Ginette Laurin of O Vertigo and Tom Stroud of Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers (WCD), have increasingly invited her to teach Continuum to their dancers during the creative process for a new work. Solo artists such as Margie Gillis, Lin Snelling and myself have also called upon her expanded repertoire of skills to stimulate our personal artistic processes.

Rabin’s most recent experience with WCD in early 2004 was particularly rewarding: “It was about freeing up the limits and boundaries that we unsuspectingly carry within ourselves and impose on our creative engagement.” Stroud had sensed that Continuum’s sound and movement explorations would provide complementary resources for his movement and text-based improvisational process: “For me, Continuum is about sources – sources of movement, emotion and energy. It’s about bringing the essential into form.” What surprised him, however, was how effective Continuum was in rejuvenating the body: “The dancers experienced a lot of relief from chronic injuries and tension.”

Using a recent installation at Montréal’s Musée d’art contemporaine entitled Ondulation (by Thomas McIntosh, Mikko Hynninen and Emmanuel Madan) to illustrate Continuum’s relationship between sound and movement, Rabin explains how the vibration of sound acts on a fluid environment and creates movement. “We see the impact of the sound on water in a kind of mandala shape. Then, the sine waves, which make incredible helices, continue to transform as they move farther away from the source of the sound. The sound is constantly transforming the water and, since we are mostly made of water, we are this constant shaping and reshaping of spiralling movement.”

Continuum’s relevance for all aspects of the dancer and choreographer’s process from training to creation to performance is clear for Rabin. Some of our traditional dance practices have a tendency to emphasize external ideals and do not prepare the dance artist for the constant confrontation with the unknown that is integral to the artistic process. She explains: “In Continuum, we practice bringing our attention not so much to the movement that we do but more so to the movement that we are … [Insofar as] you are present to [the experience of] movement or sound long enough, you are present to your self, your inner mechanism of how you function. You begin to resonate with the greater whole and it takes you organically into new territory.”

Moving to the next phase of the dive [an uninterrupted series of explorations], I lay my body across a padded folding chair, balancing my torso to find a comfortable place of equilibrium where my arms and head hang off one side and legs off the other. Almost immediately, I reconnect to what was awakened in the wave exercise and to a deep attention to my sensation. As my body adjusts to this complex gravitational challenge, I rejoice in a sense of weightlessness, ease and well-being. I feel Linda’s supportive presence close. Her light touch helps me maintain a 3-dimensional awareness of each body configuration I pass through. I remember her directive, my fluid self is not bound by any form, the possibilities are limitless.

CREDITS: Pamela Newell, ex-member of Compagnie Marie Chouinard, is involved in a variety of dancing, choreographing and teaching projects. Ultreya! , her most recent choreographic work, was presented in Montréal in October 2004. She teaches at Concordia University and the Université du Québec à Montréal where she is also completing her Master’s degree. This article first appeared in The Dance Current magazine, Volume 8, Issue 1: May 2005. It is posted here by permission of the publisher and the author. For more information about The Dance Current , please visit: www.thedancecurrent.com.